Gillian Reynolds reviews the week in radio, including Radio 4's current
season The Real George Orwell, and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's
appearance on LBC.

Start the Week (Radio 4, yesterday) considered political language, in the context of George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language, which neatly brought it into the orbit of Radio 4’s current season The Real George Orwell.

After only a weekend of this syllabus and with many a show still to go, I am already feeling it would be a good idea to turn off the radio and actually read the work. Surely Homage to Catalonia was never as lumbering as Mike Walker’s new Sunday afternoon dramatisation made it? Every line, every character came lavishly upholstered with Walker’s explanatory footnotes. I learned more about Spanish tobacco and cups of coffee than I did about Eric Blair (the real George Orwell of the title), and the Spanish Civil War. Radio plays work best when they leave room for us to see the pictures. This was like a crammer version, as if it intended to be our bridge to all the other chapters of Blair/Orwell’s life still to follow and, at the season’s end, we are all going to have to sit an exam on it.

Animal Farm (Radio 4, Saturday) was marginally more enjoyable, having the benefit of a now well-known plotline plus a well-chosen cast with Tamsin Greig as narrator, Toby Jones as Squealer, the apparatchik pig and Nicky Henson as Napoleon, the villainous prize boar who completes and then subverts the revolution of the animals against the humans. This political fable, let us remember, suffered many barriers to its first publication, passing from distinguished hand to hand before publishing house Warburgs brought it out in 1945. It has never been out of print since, lasting longer than the Soviet regime it satirised. This radio dramatisation was Orwell’s own, done for Rayner Heppenstall’s Third Programme production, broadcast in 1947, adapted slightly for today’s radio by producer/director Alison Hindell. So why did it, too, sag? Perhaps because, at this distance, it just could not avoid a fatal tone of reverence.

Onwards, into Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London nightly on Book at Bedtime for the next two weeks, and Burma (more Orwell autobiography, again adapted by Mike Walker), which began yesterday afternoon and will continue for another three Mondays. And that’s not all. Nineteen Eighty-Fourbeckons, amid many more hours of Orwelliana. So thank goodness for that lively edition of Start the Week (Radio 4) when Allan Little passed the conversational ball neatly between Joan Bakewell, Chris Mullin, Tim Montgomerie and Philip Collins as they discussed Orwell’s dictum that sloppiness of political language indicates sloppiness of thought.

How they ripped into “stakeholders”, “the squeezed middle” and “best value”, that last, said Mullin, appearing 48 times in a speech (written for him when he was a Junior Minister) without ever being defined. Collins is a speech writer. Happily, this wasn’t one of his. Tim Montgomerie, who runs an influential Conservative blog, made a strong point about people loving Boris Johnson for a verbal style like no one else’s. Collins added that mavericks need dull people around them so they can shine. Bakewell spoke best to the brief, calling in evidence advertising and its influence and the BBC’s own lamentable resort to veils of jargon, “audio” for radio,” vision” for television and other nonsense.

A weekly lesson in how the public can sweep away such verbiage is offered on LBC’s Thursday morning half-hour sessions with the Deputy Prime Minister, Call Clegg. Much mocked by the commentariat when it began, in three weeks it has become a place where obfuscation (on Europe, education or any other tricky topic) is swept away like a cobweb in the corner by callers-in and host Nick Ferrari. Both Orwell the writer and Eric Blair, the BBC producer, would be amused.

Even Desert Island Discs (Radio 4, Sunday) might have been thought to fit the Orwell agenda, its guest being the dissident Burmese political leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Nineteen-year-old Eric Blair’s first job, which he hated, although it was to recalibrate his life, politically and professionally, was in the Imperial Indian Police, serving in Burma. Kirsty Young, aglow with admiration throughout, did not pick up her guest’s reference to Burma’s struggle against its previous colonial status. Daw Suu, on the other hand, was concise, considered, charming, businesslike, almost an Orwellian model of how to deliver a political message. As of next week, by the way, my weekly message to fellow listeners, will shift to Wednesdays.

Gillian Reynolds’s week in radio will move to Wednesdays, starting on February 6